The 1798 commemoration has overshadowed the 150th anniversary of the 1848 rising so far this year. The Young Ireland insurrection was a bloodless affray: two insurgents were killed compared with more than 30,000 casualties in '98. But the Famine death toll continued to rise. In March 1848, for instance, mortality in the Tipperary Poor Law Union reached 80 a week.
The abortive rising took place in Co Tipperary without the knowledge or support of the vast majority of the Irish people, who lacked the energy and will to challenge British rule. It ended in a skirmish with police at Farrenrory near The Commons, above Ballingarry, on July 29th, 1848.
It was characterised by indecision and lack of preparation. The government's suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act on July 22nd made a humiliating submission or a premature revolt unavoidable. The ensuing debacle, although farcical in revolutionary terms, politicised the Famine experience and re-established links to the United Irishmen.
This year's Tipperary Historical Journal - a Young Ireland commemorative issue - continues to publish important articles on the Famine. In part three of his investigation of the Famine in south Tipperary, Dr Denis G. Marnane shows that first- and third-world conditions coexisted. While crowds flocked to Tipperary races on the newly-built railway, bodies were left on the floor of the local workhouse for up to a week.
Tipperary journal
Under the editorship of Marcus Bourke, the current issue transcends county interest for at least two reasons. It contains the text of Cardinal Tomβs ╙ Fiaich's Young Ireland lecture, delivered in Ballingarry shortly before his untimely death eight years ago, and Patrick O'Donohue's narrative of the 1848 rising.
Cardinal ╙ Fiaich's article is the best survey of the Young Irelanders available, with particular reference to his beloved North. In it he celebrates the cultural, educational and spiritual legacy of the Nation, without which "the corpus of Irish patriotic songs would be very poor"; Thomas Davis provided the philosophy of Irish Ireland, and in prose and verse appealed for an end to religious dissension; Charles Gavan Duffy's Library of Ireland inspired "all Irish popular literature during the rest of the 19th century".
Patrick O'Donohue was born in Co Carlow in 1810. As a solicitor's clerk in Dublin, he became involved in the Young Ireland movement. When the habeas corpus was suspended, O'Donohue received a request from Duffy, already imprisoned in Newgate, to join the leaders in Kilkenny. John Blake Dillon and Thomas Francis Meagher had gone south to rouse a reluctant William Smith O'Brien.
Wretched week
O'Donohue spent a particularly miserable time during the week of the attempted rising. He was dragged tired and hungry from Kilkenny to Cashel by James Stephens - the future Fenian chief - who mistook him for a police detective. It rained all night, as it seemed to do for much of the week, and he was drenched in the horsedrawn transport. Draughts of poit∅n sustained him. When they contacted O'Brien, O'Donohue's mistaken identity became a source of merriment at his expense. In Mullinahone, the parish priest refused to hear his confession on learning that he belonged to the insurgent party. O'Donohue wrote his observations in Kilmainham Jail within weeks of the "melancholy catastrophe" (his manuscript is in the National Library). He was sentenced to death along with O'Brien, Meagher and Terence Bellew MacManus. Their sentences were commuted later to transportation.
While lack of planning and clerical opposition contributed, O'Donohue believed the principal cause of failure was O'Brien's respect for property. He still hoped to win his fellowlandlords over to the nationalist cause. "This doctrine was wholly unsuited to the class of men he addressed it to in the mountain fastnesses of Tipperary; impoverished, famished and thirsting for food and revenge on those whom they conceive have so long oppressed them." Hence the desertions which invariably followed O'Brien's harangues.
Scrupulous conscience
O'Donohue continued: "It was truly ridiculous to hear the leader of a revolution which, to be successful, should have sanctioned all the wild and savage passions of the hordes of oppressed wretches who followed its standard, inculcating those virtues which are practised in the best-ordered communities . . . It was a pitiable sight to behold a man possessed of so many great qualities, so deficient in the one most necessary to achieve the great task he designed".
O'Brien possessed "the most rigid virtue, the purest courage and reckless bravery, but a scrupulous conscience frustrated his undertaking. A vicious man with the talents and prestige of O'Brien's name would have overthrown English dominion in Ireland. A man of such virtues could not and never will succeed in Ireland".
Perhaps O'Donohue had in mind men like Dan Breen - the subject of another article in this historical journal (available in Greene's bookshop, Dublin, price £10). After the Mullinahone police declined to hand over their guns in 1848, O'Brien withdrew; when two RIC constables refused to surrender in Soloheadbeg in 1919, they were shot dead and the War of Independence began.
The Young Irelanders were thinkers and dreamers rather than men of action. Naively they hoped that a show of force could achieve self-government. None the less, their legacy of inclusive nationalism - symbolised by the Tricolour - is being celebrated this summer.
Dr Willie Nolan, besides contributing a well-researched article to the Tipperary journal, is directing the Slieveardagh Summer School on July 6th10th (booking: phone 05634333); the Slieveardagh Rural Development commemoration runs from July 26th to August 3rd (052 56510); a bronze plaque will be unveiled in Dromoland Castle, Co Clare, the O'Brien ancestral home, on July 29th; the Taoiseach is due to visit the "Warhouse" (Widow McCormack's house) the following day; and Mr Ahern's adviser, Dr Martin Mansergh, lectures in Mullinahone on August 7th.